VE Commercial Vehicles (VECV) was established in 2008 as a joint venture between Eicher Motors and the Volvo Group, combining to become one of India’s largest truck and bus manufacturers. However, the company is much more than that.
Eicher’s first badged truck was manufactured in India in 1986, three years after the joint venture’s current CEO Vinod Aggarwal joined the company in an entry-level position, as a junior executive. Vinod grew with the business, and was still there at the time of the merger. “When the joint venture was initiated in 2008, I was the CFO of the Eicher Group, so I was very closely associated with setting it all up. I played a key role in establishing VE Commercial Vehicles,” he says.
One of the first things that VECV looked to do was align the vision of Eicher and Volvo to ensure that the merger would operate with one clear mission and voice.
“Both the organisations already had their values, vision, and identities,” Vinod explains. “But when they became part of the joint venture, the first thing we did was to create a shared vision and shared values. A lot of the values were common to both businesses, but it was important that the entire organisation should share the same vision. We began by defining what these shared values were at the management level, then we deployed it down to the work level across the entire operation.
“The leadership team defined our vision very clearly: to establish a high-performance team built on individual and collective strengths, creating a culture of mutual respect, honouring commitment, with a very clear focus on results.”